Righteous rebel.(Samuel Adams: A Life, by Ira Stoll)(Book review)

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Samuel Adams: A Life, by Ira Stoll (Free Press, 352 pp., $28)

WHEN, in April 1775, Paul Revere set off from Boston to Lexington, his main mission was not, as generations of schoolchildren once were taught, to "spread the alarm through every Middlesex village and farm." That Revere did, though his most urgent task was to warn two individuals that British troops were on the move. The two whom Revere was told the British wanted to seize (and most likely hang) were John Hancock and Samuel Adams.

These names remain familiar today, though if most Americans do not know quite who they were and what they did, this is not Longfellow's fault. John Hancock is an insurance company. Paul Revere makes tableware. In the Midwest, he operates pizza joints promising "Revolutionary Home Delivery." Sam Adams is a beer marketed to frat boys--odd, considering the upright character of this most pious of Bostonians.

Ira Stoll, in his well-researched biography Samuel Adams, does an admirable job reminding us just who this indispensable man was, what contribution he made to this country, and why the British wanted him dead. When George III, in July 1774, asked Thomas Hutchinson, the last royal governor of Massachusetts, why Adams mattered, Hutchinson cited his "great pretended zeal for liberty, and a most inflexible natural temper. He was the first that publickly asserted the Independency of the colonies upon the Kingdom."

Adams did more than that, as the king would soon learn. After exploiting the Boston Massacre for its propagandistic possibilities, Adams played a still-controversial role in the Boston Tea Party, helped organize the Sons of Liberty and the Committees of Correspondence, and served in the Continental Congress. There, Stoll writes, Adams "was further down the road to independence at this juncture than many others who later became known as founding fathers."

Ben Franklin was in London, drafting a plan for a reconciliation requiring Massachusetts to pay for the tea in Boston Harbor. George Washington was arguing that "no such thing [as independence is] desired by any thinking man in all North America," and Thomas Jefferson wanted an independent legislature for Americans, who would remain subjects of George III. In time, these and other founders came to agree with Adams. Some of them--the hard-drinking, theologically indifferent Anglicans of Virginia chief among them--had their own, often distinct and sometimes less high-minded reasons for supporting a break with the mother country, but Adams's reasons were clear from the start. They were also clearly stated, and Stoll does not for one moment lose sight of his subject's motives or allow the reader to do so.